Taiwanese firm VIA Technologies, specializing in chipsets and the x86 platform, has gone into a cooperative agreement with the OpenChrome video driver project to help in their development effort.

VIA (Very Innovative Architecture) had its origins in multimedia drivers and RandR (X Resize and Rotate Extension) functions. VIA's end of the Linux bargain is currently their graphics drivers. Documentation for their new CX700M and VX800 chipsets is available at x.org.

Open source activist Harald Welte, advisor to VIA in the realm of free software, says, "This cooperation between the community-based OpenChrome developers and VIA’s staff developers will enable everyone to shift towards one code base, combining the features and strengths of both drivers." OpenChrome developer Xavier Bachelot concurs: "We expect that pooling our development resources and working in a public repository on a consolidated codebase in this way will result in a more feature-complete driver, and a simpler and enhanced experience for the users."

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